Amiga 1942 conversion

[agermose]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

It's looking excellent agermose, a real treat for the Amiga this and I love that you take the time to do short and sweet dev updates.

Keep it up!

Thanks Mcgeezer, your Rygar thread was the inspiration for the "diary".

[agermose]

New video showing animation of enemy planes.
Player plane is now small at the start of stages. Loop animation is still missing.
[ Show youtube player ]

[agermose]

New video showing collision detection between enemy planes and player plane/bullets.
Collision check is done using "bounding box" overlap check. Needs a bit of tweaking when 4 bullets powerup is done, and when enemy bullets are done.
[ Show youtube player ]

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by agermose

New video showing collision detection between enemy planes and player plane/bullets.
Collision check is done using "bounding box" overlap check. Needs a bit of tweaking when 4 bullets powerup is done, and when enemy bullets are done.
[ Show youtube player ]

[agermose]

Playing the real game I realized my scroll speed was too fast. Slowed it down to only scroll every other frame, instead of every frame.

[agermose]

More problems today. Mapped the last levels into tiles and to my horror discovered they use a few extra colours. Need to figure out what to do.
Removing colours using Personal Paint's "less colours..." removes the wrong ones,
Perhaps I will need to work with multiple palettes in the game.

[saimon69]

You need probably some batch processor like ADPro and the superpalette feature; will choose all most used colors from each tileset image

[sparhawk]

Looks really cool! Just like the arcade.

I like the idea of using the raster bars for getting some information about the framerate, because I want to do some game myself, and was wondering how I can best visualize stuff like that, so that is a cool idea, I like to borrow.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by agermose

More problems today. Mapped the last levels into tiles and to my horror discovered they use a few extra colours. Need to figure out what to do.
Removing colours using Personal Paint's "less colours..." removes the wrong ones,
Perhaps I will need to work with multiple palettes in the game.

Using multiple palettes will be less convenient, but might allow a better look per level. If it is indeed based on individual levels, I'd probably opt for a "palette per level" approach.

[agermose]

Spent a couple of days analysing colour usage in all the levels.
Turns out the last levels use 20 colours which is too much.
Decided to merge some colours, which looks decent.

All set to test everything in the game, and then AsmOne reports out of memory.
Background tiles are 111k so I should have plenty of room.
I changed the configuration to 8Mb chip/no fast to work with the large PNG files. Should not be a problem but maybe related.

[jotd]

AsmOne on an emulator ? maybe it's time to switch to a cross assembler like VASM. I switched from Barfly to vasm a few years ago I'm not regretting it.

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by jotd

AsmOne on an emulator ? maybe it's time to switch to a cross assembler like VASM. I switched from Barfly to vasm a few years ago I'm not regretting it.

This ^^^

The old saying applies here... "A stitch in time saves nine"

How to set-up an Amiga dev toolchain on Windows, just watch the slides and ignore the arsehole in the top right corner.

[ Show youtube player ]

[sparhawk]

I have created a project which uses bebbos compiler suite and VASM with CMake. It also provides a library (which you can ignore if you don't need it) with utillity functions.
The goal was to make cross development easy to setup, and also includes example projects to illustrate how to create projects either with C/C++ or VASM or mixing both.

https://github.com/skeetor/amiga-utils

[Tigerskunk]

+1 for VASM here.. the amount of time this will save you in the future will be large..

[malko]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

[...] just watch the slides and ignore the arsehole in the top right corner.
[ Show youtube player ]

You're right. I even ask myself how he was able to set-up this toolchain

[agermose]

Originally Posted by jotd

AsmOne on an emulator ? maybe it's time to switch to a cross assembler like VASM. I switched from Barfly to vasm a few years ago I'm not regretting it.

Yes I know, check out the initial post.
I’m running on Linux and vasm does not have a release for my current OS.
Will look into it when I have updated the OS.

[phx]

Originally Posted by agermose

vasm does not have a release for my current OS.

$ make CPU=m68k SYNTAX=mot

Done.

[Nightshft]

Here somebody wrote a short article about compiling vasm for Linux (couldn't test it as I use Win).

Edit: actually he sets up vbcc, so I guess only the first few steps are needed, which matches with phx's post.

[agermose]

Originally Posted by Nightshft

Here somebody wrote a short article about compiling vasm for Linux (couldn't test it as I use Win).

Edit: actually he sets up vbcc, so I guess only the first few steps are needed, which matches with phx's post.

Thanks everybody. Will give it a go later.

Right now I'm making really great progress on the maps, and want to keep focus on it.

The AsmOne memory problem was due to lack of Fastram. Switched back to 2+6 Mb, and it works fine again.

I have now extracted all the background data (there are 9 different stages), made them into tiles, removed the tiles that contained sprite data, which leaves me with 695 unique tiles. The arcade only has 512, so the number is higher than expected. Maybe there are some flipping done on the arcade which gives the higher number.
After removing the tiles with sprite data the map of tiles has a number of "holes" in it where the sprite data used to be. These will have to be replaced with the real tiles.

32 colour palette is fixed for all stages and integrated into the game.

All technical issues now resolved for the background, and fixing up the holes in the maps is now the main thing left. This is still a big (and tedious) task.

Time flies, and 2 out of the projected 6 months have now gone.
Lots of work to do in the enemy sprite and patterns area.
This is probably the next thing to proceed with.

Still looking for someone to get the music done. Sound effects is in progress (Nightshift).

[DamienD]

Well done so far agermose

Stick at it; we all believe in you and know you'll succeed

...who cares if it takes longer than you originally thought; all projects go this way to a certain degree, depending on numerous uncontrollable factors